The online bargain-hunting on Black Friday caused problems for several e-commerce websites, but none was affected worse than Sears.com. The website buckled under the pressure of the increased visitor numbers and was unavailable for large parts of the day.

The Sears website initially just started timing out or responding with an internal server error message (HTTP error 500). It later started redirecting visitors to a temporary maintenance page that stated, “We’re sorry, Sears.com is temporarily closed for site enhancements.” (Screenshot below.)

However, a lot of the time even this maintenance page could not be delivered, when requests to the website either timed out or resulted in an internal server error, like the example below (captured by Pingdom’s monitoring service):

Several other retailers had problems with their websites as well, though not to the same extent as Sears did. StorefrontBacktalk, a news website focused on retail and e-commerce, followed the development during Black Friday with the help of several monitoring services (including Pingdom) and has posted information about several Black Friday incidents.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

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Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

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Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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